Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Decision rights
The explicit statement of who may decide what, and at which level of authority. Where more than one person could reasonably claim a decision, the rights are designed and written down in advance instead of being discovered during the dispute.
Where the standard develops it
- PL-1Delegation, ownership, and decision rightsMatching scope to capability, making authority explicit, not taking work back.
- SV-6Organisational design and leading changeTeam structures, ownership boundaries, reorgs, and transitions.
Related terms
- Charter
- The explicit statement of what a team or department owns.
- Delegation brief
- The written form of a delegation for anything larger than a day's work: outcome, constraints, authority level, who else is involved, and when the work is next reviewed together.
- Intent-based leadership
- Replacing "may I…" with "I intend to…".
- Inverse Conway manoeuvre
- Designing the organisation to produce the architecture you want, on the basis that the system will mirror the organisation's structure either way.
- Leading change
- What a structural change needs beyond its announcement.
- Managerial leverage
- Grove's framing that a manager's output is the output of the organisation under them, and that activities differ in how much output they produce per hour spent.
- One-way door
- A decision that is hard to reverse and so deserves deliberation and senior involvement.
- Ownership map
- The written record of every system, capability and decision and who owns each, checked before and after any structural change.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Decision rights. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.decision-rights). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/decision-rights